Read Online The Bell-Boy by James Hamilton-Paterson - Free Book Online
Authors: James Hamilton-Paterson
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the train for a few yards before dropping behind and returning proudly to their families.
As the breeze fanned a smell of hot oil, steam and smuts back over the passengers, Tessa thought it was almost certainly the first time either of her children had been on a steam train. She remembered her own childhood and how steam engines from Victoria Station had carried her off to school on the south coast of England. She had hated them then, but today this little model was bringing back all sorts of marginal nostalgias which emerged into the foreign sunshine like wisps of smoke from a tunnel’s mouth. Then the rueful censor chided. ‘No,’ she told herself, ‘no. That was nearly thirty years ago. That happened to someone else entirely. To hanker after the past is just another form of grasping. Let go. It only gets in the way, it can do you no good. It holds us back.’
Among the trees inside the Botanical Gardens she glimpsed a flash of the thirty-foot-high Golden Buddha which had been brought overland from Thailand five centuries earlier by ox-cart and river ferry. She had read that wherever its haulers had rested for the night, a shrine had been built to commemorate its passing. Now it sat at the end of a lotus pool beneath a ficus religiosa which had been lovingly grown from a cutting of the very Bo-tree at Bodh Gaya in India under which Gautama had achieved enlightenment and become the Buddha. Her eyes watered a little at the thought. The beauty of the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment always had that effect on her, as did reflecting on the depth and subtlety of the Dhamma. It wasutterly mysterious, yet not at all mystifying since there need be no deities to mess things up, no sacraments like the ghoulish rituals in which Christians indulged – just the power of the human mind to transcend this earth and find its own way to bliss. As Tessa had said to herself at the time of her conversion in Nepal the year Zoe was born, by their symbols shall ye know them. Who would not ally themselves with a philosophy represented by the still, rapt figure of a contemplative rather than with a religion whose sign was a gibbet? She recalled that at this very moment, back in the glooms of Europe, Easter was only a week away. Here, steeped in heat and scent and light, Malomba was ebulliently un-Lenten.
These reflections were interrupted by a series of piercing whistles from the engine and a shuddering of brakes which sent hands out automatically for support. A screaming yelp sounded nearby and a mongrel dog appeared running at a hobble diagonally away from the train. One of its forelegs ended midway and it was an instant before Tessa took in that the accident was happening now, that the screaming dog was trailing behind it a bright scatter of crimson blood across the tawny grass, that even at this moment they were trundling over its severed paw. From up front the driver was looking back at his passengers with a grin, shaking his head at the hopelessness of dogs which lay dozing with their legs on railway lines. By now he had released the brakes and the animal was eighty yards away, stopping momentarily to bite at its stump. It went on again but more lethargically and soon halted once more, head to leg. The puffing of the engine turned hollow; the train was passing into a tunnel made of green-painted tin with a brick portal. The last glimpse Tessa had was of the dog crumbling, melting downwards, a lone lump on the baked width of park.
Jason made his own way back to the hotel
Jason made his own way back to the hotel, leaving his mother and sister to recover among the diverse balms offered by the Botanical Gardens. The streets were hot and drowsy. At times he was sure he fell asleep as he walked; whenever he tripped over a pothole it was as if he woke up to recover his balance. Some way off the Glass Minaret winked and blazed above the slums and boulevards, a celestial conductor down which a tithe of the abounding light and energy of the
As the breeze fanned a smell of hot oil, steam and smuts back over the passengers, Tessa thought it was almost certainly the first time either of her children had been on a steam train. She remembered her own childhood and how steam engines from Victoria Station had carried her off to school on the south coast of England. She had hated them then, but today this little model was bringing back all sorts of marginal nostalgias which emerged into the foreign sunshine like wisps of smoke from a tunnel’s mouth. Then the rueful censor chided. ‘No,’ she told herself, ‘no. That was nearly thirty years ago. That happened to someone else entirely. To hanker after the past is just another form of grasping. Let go. It only gets in the way, it can do you no good. It holds us back.’
Among the trees inside the Botanical Gardens she glimpsed a flash of the thirty-foot-high Golden Buddha which had been brought overland from Thailand five centuries earlier by ox-cart and river ferry. She had read that wherever its haulers had rested for the night, a shrine had been built to commemorate its passing. Now it sat at the end of a lotus pool beneath a ficus religiosa which had been lovingly grown from a cutting of the very Bo-tree at Bodh Gaya in India under which Gautama had achieved enlightenment and become the Buddha. Her eyes watered a little at the thought. The beauty of the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment always had that effect on her, as did reflecting on the depth and subtlety of the Dhamma. It wasutterly mysterious, yet not at all mystifying since there need be no deities to mess things up, no sacraments like the ghoulish rituals in which Christians indulged – just the power of the human mind to transcend this earth and find its own way to bliss. As Tessa had said to herself at the time of her conversion in Nepal the year Zoe was born, by their symbols shall ye know them. Who would not ally themselves with a philosophy represented by the still, rapt figure of a contemplative rather than with a religion whose sign was a gibbet? She recalled that at this very moment, back in the glooms of Europe, Easter was only a week away. Here, steeped in heat and scent and light, Malomba was ebulliently un-Lenten.
These reflections were interrupted by a series of piercing whistles from the engine and a shuddering of brakes which sent hands out automatically for support. A screaming yelp sounded nearby and a mongrel dog appeared running at a hobble diagonally away from the train. One of its forelegs ended midway and it was an instant before Tessa took in that the accident was happening now, that the screaming dog was trailing behind it a bright scatter of crimson blood across the tawny grass, that even at this moment they were trundling over its severed paw. From up front the driver was looking back at his passengers with a grin, shaking his head at the hopelessness of dogs which lay dozing with their legs on railway lines. By now he had released the brakes and the animal was eighty yards away, stopping momentarily to bite at its stump. It went on again but more lethargically and soon halted once more, head to leg. The puffing of the engine turned hollow; the train was passing into a tunnel made of green-painted tin with a brick portal. The last glimpse Tessa had was of the dog crumbling, melting downwards, a lone lump on the baked width of park.
Jason made his own way back to the hotel
Jason made his own way back to the hotel, leaving his mother and sister to recover among the diverse balms offered by the Botanical Gardens. The streets were hot and drowsy. At times he was sure he fell asleep as he walked; whenever he tripped over a pothole it was as if he woke up to recover his balance. Some way off the Glass Minaret winked and blazed above the slums and boulevards, a celestial conductor down which a tithe of the abounding light and energy of the
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